From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Edward Snowden Speaks Out: His New Life and Concerns
Date September 14, 2019 5:37 AM
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[The man whose state surveillance revelations rocked the world
speaks exclusively to the Guardian about his new life and concerns for
the future] [[link removed]]

EDWARD SNOWDEN SPEAKS OUT: HIS NEW LIFE AND CONCERNS  
[[link removed]]


 

Ewen MacAskill
September 13, 2019
The Guardian
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_ The man whose state surveillance revelations rocked the world
speaks exclusively to the Guardian about his new life and concerns for
the future _

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The world’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden
[[link removed]], says he has
detected a softening in public hostility towards him in the US over
his disclosure of top-secret documents that revealed the extent of the
global surveillance programmes run by American and British spy
agencies.

In an exclusive two-hour interview in Moscow to mark the publication
of his memoirs, Permanent Record, Snowden said dire warnings that his
disclosures would cause harm had not come to pass, and even former
critics now conceded “we live in a better, freer and safer world”
because of his revelations.

In the book, Snowden describes in detail for the first time his
background, and what led him to leak details of the secret programmes
being run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s
secret communication headquarters, GCHQ
[[link removed]].

He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as “a
litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction,
with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts
and secret wars”.

Snowden also said: “The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the
refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and
pattern recognition.

[[link removed]]

Watch the Guardian’s exclusive video interview with Edward Snowden.

“An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be not a mere recording
device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police
officer.”

He is concerned the US and other governments, aided by the big
internet companies, are moving towards creating a permanent record of
everyone on earth, recording the whole of their daily lives.

While Snowden feels justified in what he did six years ago, he told
the Guardian he was reconciled to being in Russia
[[link removed]] for years to come and was
planning for his future on that basis.

He reveals he secretly married his partner, Lindsay Mills, two years
ago in a Russian courthouse.

While he would rather be in the US or somewhere like Germany, he is
relaxed in Russia, now able to lead a more or less normal daily life.
He is less fearful than when he first arrived in 2013, when he felt
lonely, isolated and paranoid that he could be targeted in the streets
by US agents seeking retribution.

“I was very much a person the most powerful government in the world
wanted to go away. They did not care whether I went away to prison.
They did not care whether I went away into the ground. They just
wanted me gone,” he said.

He has dispensed with the scarves, hats and coats he once used as
disguises and now moves freely around the city, riding the metro,
visiting art galleries or the ballet, joining friends in cafes and
restaurants.

The front page of the Guardian on 7 June 2013

Permanent Record, which is being published on Tuesday in more than 20
countries, charts the shift that took him from working deep inside
the NSA [[link removed]] and the CIA to
Hong Kong, where he handed over a cache of classified documents to
journalists from the Guardian.

The documents revealed the scale of mass surveillance by the US, UK
and their allies. He is high on the US wanted list and faces decades
in jail if detained.

The US government could seize royalties from the book but the
substantial advance has already been banked.

Normally averse to discussing his personal life, Snowden opened up in
both the interview and the memoirs to speak for the first time about
his life in Moscow and even the person he describes as “the love of
my life”, Mills.

Polls taken in the US in 2013 and the years immediately after showed
an almost equal split between those who viewed him as a traitor and
those who saw him as a hero.

“It is funny that now, six years later, the controversial image that
I had has begun to soften.”

Even people who dislike him personally were now prepared to accept
“we live in a better, freer and safer world because of the
revelations of mass surveillance”, he said.

One of the Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, said he
would like to see a resolution that would end Snowden’s permanent
exile, while another, the congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, said in May she
would pardon him.

Fears that President Vladimir Putin might hand him over as a gift to
Donald Trump have receded as relations between the US and Russia have
cooled.

Snowden said it helped that Russia viewed him as useful publicity.

“A country whose political troubles are legendary, whose problems
with human rights we hear about every single day has finally, somehow,
managed to have one bright spot on their human rights record … Why
would they give that up?”

He toyed with calling his memoirs The New Forever or Welcome to
Forever before settling on Permanent Record, which reflects his
concerns about the way state-run and private companies are hoarding
data.

We have moved to a society in which we are forced to live our lives
naked before power.

To counter this, he argues for both legislative reform and increased
use of end-to-end encryption to protect emails, chat and other
communications. But these are not enough, he says, to counter
accelerating technological changes allowing greater intrusions of
privacy and he calls for a worldwide protest movement, similar to
those on climate change.

“You have to be ready to stand for something if you want it to
change,” he said. “That is what I hope this book will help people
come to decide for themselves.”

Snowden, 36, lives in a two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Moscow
and makes a living mainly from fees for speaking to students, civil
rights activists and others abroad via video link-ups.

He was given temporary asylum when he first arrived and now has
permanent residency, the equivalent of a US green card, renewable
every three years, though he said this was just a formality.

He had been on his way from Hong Kong via Russia and Cuba to what he
hoped would be sanctuary in Ecuador when the US cancelled his
passport, leaving him stranded in Russia.

He likes to travel, in spite of being restricted to within Russia’s
borders, and has visited cities such as St Petersburg and the Black
Sea resort of Sochi.

“One of the things that is lost in all the problematic politics of
the Russian government is the fact this is one of the most beautiful
countries in the world. The people are friendly. The people are
warm,” he said. “And when I came here I did not understand any of
this. I was terrified of this place because, of course, they were the
great fortress of the enemy, which is the way a CIA agent looks at
Russia.”

In the past, he would not have openly spoken so warmly about Russia,
worried about how it might be perceived back home in the US.

We met in a flat – not his – on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, near the city
centre. A minute’s walk to the left of the flat there is a Starbucks
and to the right a Krispy Kreme. Snowden, who loves fast food, said
one of the things Americans did not realise about Russia was that
almost all the things you could get in the US were available there,
apart from, he added wistfully, a Taco Bell.

Throughout history, exile meant being cut off from society, “a
punishment worse than death”. But exile did not mean that any more,
he said. He could communicate with students in New York via video and
three hours later do a similar event in Germany.

Describing himself as “an indoor cat by choice”, he is happiest
sitting at his computer late into the night, communicating with
campaigners and supporters. The time difference with the US has made
that a necessity. The night before we met he had only gone to bed at
6am. His normal pattern is to sleep until late in the morning.

In Permanent Record, he describes how he and Mills met when he was 22
on an internet site, Hot or Not, on which pictures were posted and
rated. He gave her a 10 out of 10. She gave him an eight.

Seven years later, as he prepared to fly to Hong Kong, he said he did
not tell her about his plans to turn whistleblower as this would have
made her an accessory. He feels bad she did not know where he had
gone.

One of the surprises in Permanent Record is the inclusion of extracts
from her diary. These are blunt and raw, recording how “pissed”
she was at his sudden disappearance, even wondering whether he was
having an affair.

When the police and FBI were first looking for him, one police officer
was suspicious of her. She wrote: “He was looking at me like I
killed Ed. He was looking around the house for his body.”

When she turned up on Snowden’s doorstep in Moscow, he was braced
for a slap but instead she told him she loved him and supported his
decision to turn whistleblower.

You have to be ready to stand for something if you want it to change.

In the memoirs, he writes about his childhood and teenage obsession
with computers and games, such as Legend of Zelda and Super Mario
Bros. As a teenager, he hacked into a nuclear facility and reported
its vulnerabilities to the authorities. An official from the Los
Alamos nuclear lab, where the atom bomb was created, phoned his mother
to thank him.

Permanent Record offers one of the most detailed accounts of what it
is like to work inside an intelligence agency in the 21st century.
“There are no James Bonds.” He discloses that the NSA increasingly
used contractors – he was one for much of the time – rather than
employ permanent staff.

At a training school for spies, tutors nicknamed him “the Count”,
which he is quick to say sounds exotic but was actually because his
mannerisms reminded tutors of a Sesame Street character.

There was no pivotal moment when he decided to turn whistleblower. He
attended, by chance, a conference on the scale of Chinese surveillance
of its own citizens. That created a nagging thought that if China was
doing it then so too might the US. He searched and found confirmation.

The 2016 Oliver Stone movie, Snowden, portrayed him as sneaking the
documents out of the NSA by hiding an SD card, about the size of a
small stamp, on a Rubik’s Cube. Snowden neither confirms or denies
it, knowing one day he may yet face prosecution. “A Rubik’s Cube
can be very useful and functions as a distraction device and also
functions as a concealment device.”

He recalled how his plans almost came unstuck near the end. He had
secretly hoarded documents on an abandoned computer, and was moving
it. “So I got stopped in the hallway as I’m taking this old
machine back and a supervisor says: ‘What are you doing with this
machine?’ And I look at him frankly and I say: ‘Stealing
secrets.’” They both laughed. But that was exactly what he was
doing.

• Permanent Record is published by Macmillan (£20). To order a copy
go to guardianbookshop.com
[[link removed]] or
call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone
orders min p&p of £1.99.

Snowden's timeline

21 JUNE 1983 Edward Joseph Snowden is born in Elizabeth City, North
Carolina, US.

2006-2013 Initially at the CIA, and then as a contractor for first
Dell and then Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden spends years working in
cybersecurity on projects for the US National Security Agency (NSA).

20 MAY 2013 Edward Snowden arrives in Hong Kong, where a few days
later he meets with Guardian journalists, and shares with them a cache
of top secret documents he has been downloading and storing for some
time.

5 JUNE 2013 The Guardian begins reporting the Snowden leaks, with
revelations about the NSA storing the phone records of millions of
Americans, and the agency’s claim its Prism programme had “direct
access” to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US
internet giants.

7 JUNE 2013 The US president, Barack Obama, is forced to defend the
programmes, insisting that they are adequately overseen by the courts
and Congress.

9 JUNE 2013 Snowden goes public as the source of the leaks in a video
interview.

16 JUNE 2013 The revelations expand to include the UK, with news that
GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications during the 2009
G20 summit in London, and that the British spy agency has also tapped
the fibre-optic cables carrying much of the internet’s traffic.

21 JUNE 2013 The US files espionage charges against Snowden and
requests Hong Kong detain him for extradition.

23 JUNE 2013 Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Moscow. Hong Kong claims
that the US got Snowden’s middle name wrong in documents submitted
requesting his arrest meaning they were powerless to prevent his
departure.

1 JULY 2013 Russia reveals that Snowden has applied for asylum. He
also expresses an interest in claiming asylum in several South
American nations. Eventually Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and
Venezuela offer permanent asylum.

3 JULY 2013 While en route from Moscow, Bolivia’s president, Evo
Morales, is forced to land in Vienna after European countries refuse
his plane airspace, suspecting that Snowden was on board. It is held
and searched for 12 hours.

1 AUGUST 2013 After living in an airport for a month, Snowden is
granted asylum in Russia.

21 AUGUST 2013 The Guardian reveals that the UK government ordered it
to destroy the computer equipment used for the Snowden documents.

DECEMBER 2013 Snowden is a runner-up to Pope Francis as Time’s
Person of the Year, and gives Channel 4’s “Alternative Christmas
Message”.

MAY 2015 The NSA stops the bulk collection of US phone calling
records that had been revealed by Snowden.

DECEMBER 2016 Oliver Stone releases the movie Snowden featuring
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Zachary Quinto and a
cameo by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

JANUARY 2017 Snowden’s leave to remain in Russia is extended for
three more years.

JUNE 2018 Snowden says he has no regrets about his revelations,
saying: “The government and corporate sector preyed on our
ignorance. But now we know. People are aware now. People are still
powerless to stop it but we are trying.”

MARCH 2019 Vanessa Rodel, who sheltered Snowden in Hong Kong, is
granted asylum in Canada.

SEPTEMBER 2019 Snowden remains living in an undisclosed location in
Moscow as he prepares to publish his memoirs.

_Ewen MacAskill was the Guardian's defence and intelligence
correspondent until 2018. He was Washington DC bureau chief from
2007-2013, diplomatic editor from 1999-2006, chief political
correspondent from 1996-99 and political editor of the Scotsman from
1990-96. Twitter @ewenmacaskill [[link removed]]_

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